Students go to mobile app boot camp

The makers of Angry Birds famously needed 52 tries to create a widely successful mobile phone app. Hoping to speed up their own path to success, 30 Bay Area teenagers are participating in a two-day boot camp at UC Berkeley this week to learn what it takes to design a popular app.

The students, from high school sophomores to incoming freshmen at UCLA and UC San Diego, were chosen from among 160 applicants.

Their main pursuit will be learning from online publishing veterans about how to turn ideas into designs. Though they won’t dive into coding, they’ll also see what it takes to build and market an app.

The students will also have two weeks to come up with ideas for apps that can better their community. The best ideas will earn scholarships of up to $20,000.

Via Skype on Wednesday, the students heard from Samsung’s project manager for the recently released Galaxy S3 as well as a recruiter for tech companies in Boston.

Many of the students were drawn to apply for the boot camp because Samsung, one of the camp’s sponsors, is giving them Galaxy S2 tablets. But many also wanted to continue explorations with programming that began with their parents.

“My dad is making an app to sell to restaurants in his spare time and this will help me work with him,” said Chris Chow, a senior at Lowell High School.

LPS Hayward graduate Jose Moreno said as a kid he was curious about all the strange strings of text his dad was putting together on the computer, so he naturally started learning how to code himself.